The Register

We're talking about the new Facebook-funded APG submarine cable. Not that If you fancy a long-distance Asian internet hookups now available, we have good news: the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) submarine cable has been completed and brings 100Gbps of connectivity to the region.…

Fatty who? That's North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un to the rest of us If you're in China today and feel like doing something futile, try searching for “Fatty Kim the Third” or the Chinese equivalent "Jin San Pang" - Google translate says that's "金圣庞" - on social media.…

Oxford Dictionaries' 2016 choice should make 'at-right' 'Brexiteers' feel 'hygge' Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” is the Word of the Year for 2016.…

But nbn™ is now the most complained-about-telco, as a percentage of connections Australia's Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has praised nbn™, the entity building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), for an increasing number of complaints about the network.…

Cheap-and-cheerful Chinese vendors aren't paying their dues Qualcomm's trade troubles have taken a new twist, with the company launching a trade complaint to get some Chinese vendors banned from the USA.…

Advocates whitelists and other tools that 'genuinely help' security Kiwicon Google senior security engineer Darren Bilby has asked fellow hackers to expend less effort on tools like antivirus and intrusion detection to instead research more meaningful defences such as whitelisting applications.…

The world’s fastest quantum simulator models an interaction between a many-body system of more than 40 atoms within one billionths of a second, according to research published on Wednesday.…

The smart home Spotify has arrived Review It was only a few years ago that everyone was scoffing at futurists who claimed that we would all be streaming our music rather than buying digital or physical copies.…

First time machine translation has used true transfer learning The gap between human and machine translators could be narrowing as researchers find a new way to improve the learning capabilities of Google Translate’s neural network.…

Switchzilla vows to stay the course in cloud n' security push Cisco says it will continue its push into the services space as its revenues were once again down slightly.…

Amazon offers to handle payments for third-party SaaS devs Amazon Web Services has opened a store that will allow customers to purchase additional software-as-a-service products and pay with their monthly AWS bill.…

Schneier crap-storm warning falls on deaf ears Congress provided a masterclass in selective hearing Wednesday when urged by experts to do something about the increasing risk posed by poor IoT security.…

Next up, dogs and cats living together It has been a day for software surprises – first Microsoft joins the Linux Foundation, and now Google is joining the Technical Steering Group of the .NET Foundation.…

It's not quite an Internet of S**t, but nor does it come up smelling of roses Telstra has managed to emit a response to The Register's questions about the soundness of its Smart Home service strategy, which we received at 5:10 PM yesterday.…

Massive $26bn bid may go ahead – but we won't know why Microsoft has offered "concessions" in return for letting its $26bn dollar acquisition of LinkedIn move ahead, according to officials from the European Commission.…

Monarch's rubber stamp expected to turn bill into law within weeks The UK's Investigatory Powers Bill has completed its passage through parliament and now only awaits Her Majesty's stamp of approval before becoming law.…

Tech policy under the Donald: He's got a pen and a phone, too Comment No wonder America’s biggest lobbyist, Google, has been so frantic to drive through its agenda this year.…

Redmond's cloud has early-morning hiccup Microsoft says it has recovered from the issues that left some Azure customers unable to access the cloud service in the US.…

Techies, you've 'met or exceeded' all we asked of you, here's your BONUS Exclusive The global IT team at Hewlett Packard Enterprise that company execs previously praised for managing the smooth break-up of the organization is finally being rewarded – the entire department is being, er, outsourced.…

No use just wanting something, make it a statutory requirement If the government wants to be transparent then it ought to make transparency a statutory requirement for its CCTV-wielding authorities, according to the Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC).…

Salt Lake City SC16 booth talk at Steve Luczo’s company Analysis Stifel MD Aaron Rakers went on a Seagate booth tour at SC16 and notes Seagate thinks it is a year ahead of WD and Toshiba with HAMR (Heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology.…

Platform little more than 'skunkworks' outside tech industries Apache Big Data Fast, unbridled growth has hurt adoption of Hadoop, according to a leading advocate of the technology.…

Containerised Content Intelligence... and it kind of/sort of converges data silos HDS has announced Hitachi Content Intelligence, software which can search for and read content in multiple structured and unstructured data silos and analyse it.…

Good job Redmond nipped this in the bud Footage has emerged of Nokia's never-released smartwatch – suggesting Microsoft was wise to kill the project when it acquired the Finns' mobile division.…

The good, the bad, and the ugly rusty spinners revealed Backup and cloud storage provider Backblaze’s latest quarterly disk failure rate table shows WD 6TB drives had an 11.31 per cent annualised failure rate in the third 2016 quarter, with Seagate 4TB drives spinning into the ground almost as often, with a 10.2 per cent rate.…

More Linux love from Redmond – and a public preview of SQL Server for Linux Microsoft has joined The Linux Foundation as a Platinum member, the highest level of membership. The news was announced at the company's Connect developer event in New York.…

Seagate does that annoying thing when they update a product six months later Seagate has tweaked its IronWolf NAS drive to make it stream data faster for longer and tacked the epithet "Pro" on the end.…

Harpoon to go in 2018 with no replacement – yet Royal Navy warships will be less capable of fighting enemy vessels than they were in the 19th century as Britain’s Harpoon anti-ship missile will be withdrawn in two years – with no replacement in sight.…

You might need a forklift for this mofo Lenovo has announced the mother of all disk drive enclosures at SC16 – the D3284 JBOD, a 5U enclosure holding up to 84 3.5-inch disk and/or solid-state drives.…

Redcentric exec: 'Past few days been challenging'. Ha, should ask your investors A bean counter and legal eagle are to pick over the financial blundering at managed service provider Redcentric, the London Stock Exchange-listed business has confirmed.…

Brazen hackers actually accepting credit card payments Hackers have unleashed a strain of scammer that activates on compromised computers when it encounters filenames containing strings that have been associated with child abuse clips and images.…

That's another win for a proprietary IoT standard British IoT streetlight firm Telensa has been named as a global market leader in, er, LED streetlights with networked cameras on them.…

But can it play Crysis on ultra? Dell EMC is adding a Xeon Phi server and Tesla GPU acceleration to its PowerEdge high-performance computing (HPC) server line-up…

Outsourcing giant pops one in this year's sack Trigger-happy CSC is aiming the redundancy gun at another batch of hapless employees just in time for Chrimbo – a fate perhaps only slightly worse than actually working at the integrator over the festive season.…

Plus: Some cheeky touchscreen laptop reviews

You guys had better get a move on then Traditional IT outsourcing has "had its heyday", chief technology officer Joseph Reger of traditional-IT-outsourcer-turned-wannabe-digital-upstart Fujitsu has said.…

Tell us what you really think Reader Survey We've put up with relentless marketing and promotion of cloud for over five years now, but how much has the world really moved on?…

We're looking for a partner is all Japanese tech godzilla Fujitsu has insisted it is not exiting the PC market despite being in talks with Chinese rival Lenovo to offload its devices unit.…

Unexpected items in the banking area Analysis Security analysts have narrowed down the range of possible explanations for the Tesco Bank breach.…

Explosive growth anticipated on what is between $100-200m in annual revenue Interview Dev Ittycheria, chief executive and president at MongoDB, took a moment out from the company's European event to tell The Register about its strategy for the future.…

Machines nickel-and-diming other machines Sysadmin Blog I've always hated the "razor and blades" business model. It pops up everywhere in our society, and is becoming ever more popular in IT. There is enough crossover with subscription models that it's hard to tell where one business model stops and the other begins. Regardless of the nuances, "razor and blades" is nothing but a tax on the poor.…

Status symbol Xeon colosso-towers get the Apple TV treatment HP Ink has decided that workstations need to follow the business PC trend of shrinking into form factors resembling the Apple Mini or even the Apple TV.…

World's number two browser now boasts retro-emoji, better media handling and more The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox web browser has hit version 50.0 on Windows, MacOS, Linux and Android.…

IETF hopes to simplify multivendor routing admin It's about time the world had one: a proposal to pull the world of router configuration into the warm embrace of the popular YANG protocol.…

Make America's CEOs write open letters again Big Blue's big boss, Ginni Rometty, is hoping to dance on the tightrope that Big Orange has brought to the White House.…

Unite: £86.5m profits makes pre-Christmas axe wielding unnecessary Fujitsu’s plans to axe 1,800 jobs in the UK despite making £86.5m in profit last year is a necessary boost to margins which are “significantly below market expectation” – the firm’s UK and Ireland chair Michael Keegan has said.…

Try getting your Board to take security seriously when perps are flogged with wet lettuce 15 of the United States of America have flogged Adobe with warm, wet, lettuce for its 2013 mega-breach that saw 38 million credentials leaked.…

Bad LUKS strikes Pengiunistas Attackers with a little more than a minute to spare can compromise Linux boxes by holding down the Enter key for 70 seconds, an act that gifts them a root initramfs shell .…

You know the drill: pause and patch to prevent p0wnage IT shops running CA Technologies' Unified Infrastructure Management (UMI) – formerly CA Nimsoft – need to run patches for three vulnerabilities, one remotely exploitable.…

CCS Insight annual predictions Facebook and Apple will start buying sports and movie rights. The internet startup bubble will burst. And lots of people will buy a Nokia phone. What do you reckon?…